T-Mobile network outage affects thousands of customers in the US, experts reject claims of DDoS attack
Widespread routing issue affected T-Mobile's voice and text service, the company reveals
Thousands of T-Mobile customers across the US reported widespread network outages on Monday that left them unable to make phone calls or access the internet.
The outage appeared to have started at around 12-1pm Easter Time on Monday, and by 4pm ET, service tracker DownDetector had logged more than 100,000 reports of T-Mobile outages, with most complaints coming from New York, Texas, Florida, Georgia, California, and the Washington, DC, area.
Some users also reported voice and data issues with other carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, on social media platforms and on DownDetector, but both carriers said that their service was operating normally.
They also said that problems in T-Mobile network caused disruption when their customers tried to call T-Mobile lines.
Reports on DownDetector also showed some customers having issues with Comcast, Twitch, Facebook and Instagram.
"Our engineers are working to resolve a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country," Neville Ray, T-Mobile's (TMUS) president of technology, said in a tweet at 4:18 pm ET.
The company also disclosed that the outages were caused due to a "widespread routing issue" that affected voice and text.
By evening, Ray tweeted that T-Mobile data services were back and "some calls are completing."
Following the massive service outage, the hacking group Anonymous claimed that the nationwide outage was a result of a "major DDoS attack".
The group also posted a digital map on Twitter that showed different types of attacks happening between the US and the rest of the world on Monday.
Anonymous added that China could be the source of the attacks on the US, as the "situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating."
The source of the DDoS attack on the United States is currently unknown. We speculate it may be China as the situation between South and North Korea is currently deteriorating.
— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) June 15, 2020
Those claims, however, were rejected by experts from cyber security firm MalwareTech.
In a tweet, the company said that Anonymous digital map shows a random sample of global DDoS traffic badly plotted on a world map and it lacks "context to make any inferences at all".
It was a transit failure at a provider, for info. The same DDoS graphics do the rounds ever time this happens, you just look at DDoS mitigation provider websites and take a screenshot.
— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) June 16, 2020
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince also rejected Anonymous' claim that these outages were related to a DDoS attack. He said that T-Mobile was making some changes to their network configurations, which didn't go well and led to network outages.
There's a lot of buzz right now about a "massive DDoS attack" targeting the US, complete with scary-looking graphs (see Tweet below). While it makes for a good headline in these already dramatic times, it's not accurate. The reality is far more boring. 1/X https://t.co/4wDIlKnfQg
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) June 15, 2020
Price added that Cloudflare did not see any spikes in internet traffic during the outage.
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